Wednesday, December 16, 2009

GPS “Miss Calculating”! Are You Being Manipulated?

I don’t have a GPS, still looking, especially for Geocaching, so I don’t know much about them.

This seems like a fun addition, so I wondered if this is general knowledge:
“You can easily fix the "recalculating" to have her say anything you want to. My Garmin says: "Darn, I screwed up again, give me a second, I'll get it figured out". Just log in to: http://turboccc.wikispaces.com/TTSVoiceEditor and go crazy with the endless possibilities to change your Garmin's phrases.
Just make sure you save the current vocabulary to a directory on your
computer so you can go back to the originals if you need to.
If there is an In-n-Out Burger within a mile, she says " Holy crap, slow down, there’s an In-n-Out Burger ahead".

___________________

Are you being manipulated? “A newly wed couple badly wanted to invite their families for a sumptuous Christmas Day dinner and the traditional exchanging of gifts. Everything seemed to work out all right except they were short of money to pay for the obligatory gifts. So they went shopping armed with their credit cards. As they shopped around from store to store, the atmosphere of the music, colorful gifts and inviting decorations lured them into spending much more than they could reasonably afford.

Then in late January, the bills started coming in. They had precious little money set aside to pay them. They struggled to keep enough food on the table, pay the house rent and make the car payment. They realized too late they had succumbed to all the Christmas advertising—ending up with a painful financial hangover.
Could this story also describe your circumstances?

Christmas is big business

Those Christmas bells chiming during the holiday season might be likened to cash registers ringing up millions of dollars in retail sales. Christmas is very big business and is thought to be great for the national economy. But has anyone thought to ask whether this type of wild spending is really in people's best interests, either now or, more importantly, for their long-term spiritual well-being?
Should we be buying gifts others frequently don't want or need with money we don't have? It's a logical question.
Yet people will defend observing Christmas by countering that it's a celebration honoring Jesus' birth. If that's true, why buy gifts for others and not Jesus Christ? Is Christendom behind the presumptive trappings of a pre-Christmas season or is it being promoted by secular businesses for their own gain?

Purdue University professor Richard Feinberg understands the commercial value of the Christmas shopping season. He found the retail forecast of the Christmas season to be at least 75 percent of yearly profits. He predicted that Christmas holiday shopping would total an incredible $450 billion or more in America. Barring an economic downturn, it could be even higher this year.
Ironically, Christmas is so popular that millions of atheists and people of other religions celebrate the holiday. Why don't people, those who claim to be Christians or otherwise, resist the commercial aspect of the season?

What's behind the magnetic pull of Christmas?

Clearly the Christmas season has a strong magnetic pull, but most people don't fully realize it or know how powerful it is. Every year a Christmas advertising onslaught tries to influence the public to spend, spend and spend some more. “

Manipulating our behavior

“Dr. Robert Cialdini, a professor at Arizona State University, may be the most cited social psychologist in the world today. His book Influence: Science and Practice (1993) is a staple text in the academic world.
Cialdini writes: "It is odd that despite their current widespread use and looming future importance, most of us know very little about our automatic behavior patterns. Perhaps that is so precisely because of the mechanistic, unthinking manner in which they occur . . . They make us terribly vulnerable to anyone who does know how they work".

Do we imagine that today's advertising gurus don't know about human behavioral patterns?

Cialdini states: "Our automatic tapes usually develop from psychological principles or stereotypes we have learned to accept. Although they vary in their force, some of these principles possess a tremendous ability to direct human action. We have been subject to them from such an early point in our lives, and they have moved us about so pervasively then, that you and I rarely perceive their power. In the eyes of others, though, each such principle is a detectable and ready weapon, a weapon of automatic influence".

Observing Christmas because "everyone does it" is a trigger feature. Other triggers include the music, the lights, the decorations and the sentimental store displays, each of which can cause us to respond automatically—rendering us nearly helpless as we part with our money.
But do we really honor God by uncontrolled spending during the Christmas season? “
__________________________

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